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Comment by mapleoin | Hacker News Reader

From the about page:

Email is in need of a fresh start. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I can’t wait to check my email!”

Am I the only person who has no problem managing their email? I'm a software developer and have 4 email accounts that I check regularly all from the same Thunderbird email client. I have filters and folders for mailinglists. I have different accounts for different personas (personal, work, work and open source/fun). I get hundreds of mails per day, tens a day that I actually need to react to.

I really don't have the problem of dreading to check my email. I know I'm not a manager of a startup or a big company, but then most people aren't.

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That underlies a major issue i'm seeing more of in the tech startup scene: Coming up with solutions to problems a large majority of users don't face. Blog after blog proclaiming that "Email is broken", "It's time to rethink email" etc, etc.

No. Your users don't think that at all. They are happily chugging along, oblivious to the crises manufactured by neckbeards. Your value proposition needs to be reframed in terms of what your product can do on it's own merit; without the need to attempt to deprecate an existing technology/platform.

These are solutions to problems faced by middle- and upper-management, so there are real customers out there that have this real problem. The difficulty, however, is getting this cool, shiny solution into their existing corporate email workflow.

Exactly. People seem to be designing entirely consumer focused experiences around a problem that's main pained group and largest collection of cash is the upper echelons of corporations.

I think when you're at that level you're actually competing with humans. If I'm upper management and have too much incoming mail, I can hire a human to help me sift/prioritise/ignore as well as all the other things a human can help me with.

Very very very well put! That actually holds true to many B2B sales scenarios - especially when targeting C levels.

// OT //

Your point connected especially well with me since it rang so many bells with what I experienced when I was pitching my last startup (now defunct) in the live music industry.

Music and live music industry is a bit perverted in that it's such a "cool" scene to be associated with that it has a constant flux of fresh and very much free workforce available. As in humans.

This eventually created a bit of a conundrum in terms of value creation and pitching digital solutions to our prospecting customers - the live music promoters.

How exactly can you create value out of eg. time savings or better workflow management if the essential resource (workforce) is basically free and abundant. :)

Needless to say I'm not a huge fan of music startups in general nowadays for this particular reason since this problem basically permeates the whole industry through and through.

I have a hard time seeing a B2B / B2B2C service provider extracting a meaningful business out of music industry SMB's.

But I digress. :)

Like I said in my other message: They already have it, and it's called MS Outlook.

There's nothing mentioned in the advantages list that one cannot do readily with Outlook (under a different name for the feature in some cases).

I'm with you. What I dread is missing an email (spam filter, etc), not actually receiving messages.

I totally wake up every morning and think, "I can't wait to check my email!"

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